Minneapolis, the real city of brotherly love 07/09

I woke up around 10:30, read a bit of my Star Wars book, and headed to Taco Bell to start the day off right. I was thinking of going to the physics lab today, but I woke up too late. The last tour would have started before I would be able to get there. I called my mom to see if her friend in Minneapolis was still willing to show me around the Guthrie theater. She said yes, so I met him (Russell Johnson, Project Stage Manager) at the theater at 230. He gave me a backstage tour to the theater, showing me everything from the lobby to the set design area to the administrative offices. Everything was very modern looking, and it seemed that no expense was spared to make it the best.

One of the cool features of the theater is that there is fiber optic cable throughout the entire place. That means they can have a 3 piece band playing in the lobby, and send that sound into one of the theater rooms if they felt like it. They can apparently take any sound from any room and put it into another room.

At the end of the tour, I asked if there were any shows going on tonight. Russell said yes, and he was very nice and gave me a free ticket to “When We Are Married.” It was only 3:15, and the show didn’t start until 7:30, so I went looking for something to do to kill some time.

I settled on going to Home Depot to buy some aluminum to try and fix my camper up a bit. They way I built my camper with the soft top, wind kept on pushing into the gaps between my cross members, and I thought that was responsible for some of my loss of mileage. I thought smoothing out that area with some aluminum under the top would fix it. Long story short, it doesn’t.

However, while I was putting the aluminum on in the Home Depot parking lot, no less than 10 people came up to compliment me on it. We talked for various amounts of time on various topics, but they were all super nice people. I was very impressed with Minneapolis folk.

I went back to the Guthrie, saw the show (which was very well done), and then headed north towards Soudan and the physics lab there. Oh, due to a parking machine error and a very nice attendant at the lot, I got to park for free for the show as well.

I pulled in to St. Croix State Park about 2 am. I needed to stay in a park so I could recharge my almost dead battery. I couldn’t figure out how much to leave for the night, so I just figured I’d do it in the morning (if I had to). But just then I was tired and all I wanted to do was sleep, so I didn’t worry about it anymore.